Fredric Jameson’s theories of postmodernism have had an extensive impact on scholarly discussions of post-war literature. As Amy Hungerford outlined in 2010, “critics such as Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-François Lyotard, and others have defined the period by the … fractured narratives, ironic play, and aesthetic virtuosity of writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, Acker, DeLillo, and Barth and have looked to the economic substructures of culture as a way of understanding these aesthetic developments” [1, p. xix]. Hungerford contrasts these dominant trends in postmodern literary studies with a newer group of scholars including herself, Daniel Grausam, Mark McGurl, and Timothy Parrish. This group has aimed to move away from readings that concentrate on the economic or political dimensions of late capitalism. Within this cohort there has instead been a focus on notions of identity, spirituality and trauma in postmodernist literature. Despite Hungerford positioning Jameson in contrast to these newer lines of enquiry, it remains that he has rarely engaged with postmodern literature in any depth. Across his career, he has consistently avoided discussing what he calls the “high literary novel” after modernism.
If high-modernist literature remains somewhat ambiguous within Jameson’s larger categories of history and literary development, the postmodern novel often occupies an even more marginal position. As discussed earlier in this book, the novel form remains the predominant focus of Jameson’s interpretive practice when discussing the nineteenth century and the modernist period. When he begins to concentrate on postmodernity, however, the novel becomes less central to his theoretical project. In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), Jameson discusses the architect John Portman and Andy Warhol at length. In comparison, his engagements with Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs are only short asides. In this work, Jameson theorises that changes to a variety of Western cultural forms reflect global political and economic developments. The marginalised position that literature occupies within this context sees Jameson less interested in the novel as cultural material. This pivot away from his earlier literary focus continues for more than a decade. This is particularly evident in his books published throughout the 1990s: Signatures of the Visible (1990), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), The Seeds of Time (1994) and The Cultural Turn (1998). These texts either discuss postmodernism in a general sense—with little engagement with the literary—or concentrate almost exclusively on cinema. In 2002, Jameson published A Singular Modernity , which signalled a return to literary studies in earnest. His next major work, Archaeologies of the Future (2005), continued in this fashion. During this period, however, his lack of interest in canonical postmodernist authors remained. More recently, The Antinomies of Realism (2013) has included discussions of contemporary authors such as David Mitchell, but Jameson does not see a novel such as Cloud Atlas (2004) in relationship to any canonical post-war texts. Elsewhere, he makes frequent but cursory mentions of certain postmodern authors including Burroughs, E. L. Doctorow and Pynchon. While these do not often represent sustained engagements, they provide some clues to Jameson’s views on postmodern literature. Running alongside these discussions of the postmodern literary novel, he has also produced a range of material on other kinds of post-war texts. Here the generic forms of the science fiction and detective novel have often interested him in ways that the high-literary novel no longer does.
This chapter will seek to delineate how Jameson has positioned these varying literary forms throughout his career. The first section will concentrate on the limitations he has placed on the high-literary postmodern novel, and how these have influenced his broader conceptualisations of the period. Through this analysis, I will question whether elements of his work may still be useful for contemporary criticism that has pursued a more diverse understanding of postmodern literature. The second section will consider how Jameson’s readings of generic fiction articulate major notions of his theoretical project, such as cognitive mapping and utopian desire. Through this discussion, the chapter will outline the ways in which his textual preferences influence his theoretical project. While this work on generic fiction frequently constructs another set of problematic formal, generic or political boundaries, this chapter will conclude by considering his more recent work on contemporary generic forms, and the extent to which Jameson’s categorising operations have become more fluid over the past decade. This chapter will thus aim to illustrate the extent to which his later material might reconcile with ongoing developments in postcolonial studies, as well as to discuss how his more recent categories of the collective and discussions of the future offer new opportunities for interpretive work.
High Literature in Postmodernity
Jameson sees Burroughs, Don DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon, amongst others, as postmodern “high literature”. The authors he mentions are similar to the ones Hungerford lists above. Critics have historically grouped them in a category of postmodernist literature, although more recently scholars have developed other terminology. In this manner, scholars have begun to use categories such as “metafiction” or “the American post-war novel”. In contrast, Jameson stresses these authors’ debt to high modernism. While he has occasionally discussed a sense that postmodernity witnesses the blurring of high and low culture, he also claims that authors such as Pynchon and Doctorow continue in a lineage of “residual elite culture in our own postmodern age” [2, p. 152]. As this book has demonstrated so far, Jameson’s textual interests often align with a decidedly conventional, “high literary” version of the canon. By the time of postmodernity, however, this sense of cultural division has become problematic for Jameson. Despite their classification as high-literary figures, the postmodernists are unable to escape the reification of the cultural sphere. Jameson notes that the fiction “is popular: maybe not in mid-Western towns, but in the dominant world of fashion and mass media. That can only mean … that there has come to be something socially useful about art from the point of view of the existing socio-economic structure; or something deeply suspect about it” [3, pp. 413–414]. The utopian gesture afforded to James Joyce and other modernists is entirely absent here. In contrast, the postmodernists write within a culture that treats literature predominantly as a commodity, even as they remain beholden to certain outdated, high-modernist modes. Despite his ambivalence towards this kind of fiction, however, Jameson regularly mentions canonical postmodern authors in order to provide brief, instructive examples of the field. He describes Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) as a “fundamental paradigm”, for example [4, p. 388]. He has also written on Doctorow on a few occasions. While claiming to enjoy novels such as Ragtime (1975) and The Book of Daniel (1971), Jameson also focuses on their articulation of a specifically postmodern problem—the impossibility of representing history. He also appears to continue to consume this type of literature: he has mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) as well as the stories of Alexander Kluge, amongst others [see 4, p. 386; 5, pp. 187–192]. On occasion, Jameson has also claimed the French nouveau roman is “the last significant innovation in the novel” [2, p. xv]. He has only worked on the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, however, in a few short essays. We should also note that Jameson establishes his interest in the nouveau roman well before his early articles on postmodernism. In this regard, Jameson’s publications prior to 1983 become important texts when considering his engagement with the postmodern novel.
While Jameson’s essays in the 1980s provided comprehensive articulations of postmodernity, his work throughout the 1970s had already outlined many key theories relating to the historical period. This is obscured, however, by the fact that postmodernity and postmodernism were emerging concepts when his initial discussions of authors such as Pynchon and Robbe-Grillet were being published. In these moments, Jameson does not often use the term postmodernity, but still discusses the historical moment in a manner that reflects his later articles. In Marxism and Form, for example, he discusses a new “coherent culture with which we are all familiar: John Cage’s music, Andy Warhol’s movies, novels by Burroughs, plays by Beckett, Godard, camp, Norman O. Brown, psychedelic experiences; and no critique can have any binding force which does not begin by submitting to the fascination of all these things as stylizations of reality” [3, p. 413]. At this point, these kinds of texts still have an aesthetic and political potential for Jameson. He claims that “insofar as we are Americans, none of us can fail to react to such things as pop art which admirably express the tangible and material realities, the specificity of that American life which is ours” [3, p. 414]. Later, when Jameson discusses pop art in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , he claims, “Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes … no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all” [2, p. 8].
We can connect this more open discussion of postmodern authors to the looser definitions of modernism and postmodernism that Jameson works with throughout the period. In “Modernism and Its Repressed; or, Robbe-Grillet as Anti-Colonialist” (1976), for example, he uses the term modernism throughout. He will later describe Robbe-Grillet specifically as a postmodernist author. In “On Raymond Chandler ” (1970), Jameson likewise states that Robbe-Grillet and Vladimir Nabokov are both “chief practitioners of art-for-art’s sake in the recent novel” [6, p. 66]. He will later see Nabokov as contributing predominantly to the late modernist period. Similarly, in “Metacommentary ” (1971), Jameson describes Burroughs’s Naked Lunch as an example of the emerging “plotless” novel [7, p. 12]. Later, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture ” (1979), this focus will shift. It is here that Jameson describes Pynchon as producing “post-modernist literary texts” [8, p. 14]. Jameson may make several comments that suggest an ironic distance from these new literary forms in the 1970s, but he is still somewhat interested in discussing specific novels and authors. By the early 1990s and the publication of the book Postmodernism, however, he has a strongly defined sense of the period and his interest in the kind of North American post-war novel represented by Pynchon and others has declined. Jameson discusses Nabokov on occasion and writes briefly on the nouveau roman in a short chapter in Postmodernism. Authors such as Burroughs, on the other hand, rarely appear in Jameson’s work.
The fact that Jameson has not typically discussed the postmodern novel in depth, however, allows for a reappraisal of this cultural form’s relationship to his understanding of postmodernity. As discussed above, scholars such as Amy Hungerford and Timothy Parrish have worked towards new readings of post-war literary criticism—arguing for a move away from Jameson’s conceptualisation of the period in the process. Hungerford, for example, argues for scholarship that “sidesteps the cultural materialist accounts of postmodernism that have been so powerful in defining the field—specifically, Fredric Jameson’s argument about the relationship between culture and late capitalism in Postmodernism” [9, p. 413]. Yet, as I will discuss further below, scholars continue to produce illuminating work on the post-war novel while borrowing from Jameson’s work on postmodernity. Contemporary criticism must now operate from a different historical perspective to Jameson’s initial work on postmodernism. This is especially evident in work that discusses the post-postmodern, which does not necessarily “helplessly iterate and perpetually enact Jameson’s concern that aesthetic creation and commodity production have become the same thing”, as Timothy Parrish claims [10, p. 646]. Given that Jameson’s work on postmodernity often ignores the literature of the period, it would also seem relevant to discuss how the novel functions in this historical context in comparison with architecture, film and visual art. This is especially relevant when considering representations of interiority or personal political engagement. At this stage, and despite his impact on the field, a further consideration of Jameson’s characterisations of postmodernity and its literature seems necessary.
I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism.… I like the architecture and a lot of the newer visual work.… The music is not bad to listen to, or the poetry to read; the novel is the weakest of the newer cultural areas and is considerably excelled by its narrative counterparts in film and video (at least the high literary novel is; subgeneric narratives, however, are very good, indeed, and in the Third World of course all this falls out very differently).…
These are tastes, giving rise to opinions; they have little to do with the analysis of the function of such a culture and how it got to be that way. [2, pp. 298–299]
Most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgments on the phenomenon of postmodernism.… But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena … cannot afford the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judgments.… The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. [11, p. 29]
While Jameson’s descriptions of postmodernity in terms of capitalist development and “depthlessness” are now more well-known, this argument represented a significant shift in scholarly approaches to postmodernism at the time. Despite this imperative, however, his approach to the postmodern novel demonstrates how his theoretical frameworks often mirror his preferences for specific texts. His discussion of authors such as Doctorow and Pynchon, for example, frequently outlines the limited extent to which the postmodern novel is able to perform any kind of meaningful critique of the historical and political situation of late capitalism. From Jameson’s Marxist position, this lack of political efficacy is obviously a negative and critical assessment. In this regard, there is a sense that his articulation of political possibility in postmodern cultural material aligns with his own aesthetic preferences. This would appear to contradict his argument that discussions of postmodernity should aim to ignore notions of cultural worth. As discussed earlier in this book, critics have often portrayed this aspect of Jameson’s work as a nostalgia for older cultural forms. By instead concentrating on how his literary interests are connected to his broader depictions of postmodernity, however, we might come to a more nuanced understanding of how his engagement with cultural forms impacts on his theoretical frameworks for the period.
[The novel] provides us with a striking illustration of a whole work of displacement by which the written narrative of an essentially class fantasy has been transformed, in the Hollywood product, into something quite different.… Gone is the whole … aristocratic brooding over death, along with the erotic rivalry in which class antagonisms were dramatized; the Hooper of the film is nothing but a technocratic whiz-kid, no tragic hero but instead a good-natured creature of grants … and scientific know-how. But Brody has also undergone an important modification: he is no longer the small-town island boy … rather he has been transformed into a retired cop from New York City, relocating on Nantucket in an effort to flee the hassle of urban crime, race war, and ghettoization. The figure of Brody now therefore introduces overtones … of law-and-order, rather than yankee shrewdness, and functions as a tv police-show hero transposed into this apparently more sheltered but in reality equally contradictory milieu which is the great American summer vacation. [8, pp. 27–28]
For Jameson, this more broadly resonant subtext ensures the film has a wider appeal than the paperback, and has a major impact on the film’s importance as a text. Its position as an early example of the “blockbuster” and continued prominence in our reception of film history becomes tied to its expression of certain twentieth-century tendencies and tensions. Elsewhere, Jameson commonly discusses a broad variety of textual elements using a narrative of emergence and regression. He frequently discusses character tropes, formal innovations or symbolic gestures using this framework, in order to demonstrate their relationship to the historical situation that surrounds them. Even though these moments are often revelatory in Jameson’s work, they often demonstrate how his personal tastes—particularly when discussing the novel—impact on his sense of historical change. High literature’s limited ability to represent postmodernity becomes entwined with its apparent decline in prominence in popular culture and other cultural hierarchies. For Jameson, the novels of Burroughs, Doctorow, Pynchon and others no longer articulate the changed cultural landscape in the same way a film like Jaws can. The subsequent loss of importance of this kind of novel in the cultural sphere reflects these limitations. Elsewhere, Jameson argues against scholarship that valorises or diminishes periods of literature in relationship to one another. Nevertheless, he has typically framed his interest in the realist or high-modernist novel in relation to the ability of their formal qualities to express the political unconscious of the period. While he might argue that judgements of cultural worth or aesthetic value should not inform Marxist criticism, it remains that his work often ties discussions of formal innovation with the novel’s ability to express deeper political realities. As such, his theory must be intrinsically influenced by notions of taste, if we are to consider the form of a novel, its plot or its subtext as in any way tied to our aesthetic appreciation of a text.
These aesthetic preferences lead to several moments where Jameson restricts the conceptual valences of the literary novel in favour of more generic forms. For example, in “Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam” (1982), he states that it is “the inauthenticity … of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and alienation, save the essential—the logic of stereotypes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time” [4, p. 348].1 This argument does elide the sense that novels by authors like DeLillo and Doctorow are frequently concerned with stereotypes or generic character tropes. For instance, DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) focuses on the dissonance that Jack Gladney experiences as he moves through—and attempts to act in—his suburban environment. His efforts to occupy a position of authority as an academic and father are persistently undercut by the meaninglessness and absurdity of the postmodern world he inhabits. Jameson also works to limit the extent to which the postmodern novel can do political work. In Postmodernism, he claims that Doctorow’s Ragtime cannot recreate the past, rather “it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past.… If there is any realism left here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of … slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history” [2, p. 25]. Jameson often defines postmodern literature in terms of what it lacks: here it is a Lukácsian sense of mimetic realism that has the ability to map society and history in politically productive fashion. In this context, Ragtime becomes a literary example of the “nostalgia film”. For Jameson, films that recreate the past have the effect of replacing a sense of historical development with “the history of aesthetic style” [2, p. 20]. In these prescriptive moments, Jameson’s work limits the critical capacity of post-war cultural material, as well as its ability to conceptualise specific problems of the postmodern.
This tendency is perhaps most obvious in his discussion of Andy Warhol. Jameson claims Warhol’s work expresses a problem of postmodernity, yet does not allow for the sense that Warhol’s work is an articulation or investigation of that problem. In Postmodernism, Jameson claims that Warhol’s screen-prints, “which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political … art in the postmodern period” [2, p. 9]. In this moment, Jameson accepts that these texts are about the role of media in postmodern society and the commodification of the image, but refutes their political power. Even as they express a particular component of the historical situation, this reading is limited by the fact that Jameson does not find the works “powerful”. The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel that similarly delineates certain aspects of the postmodern moment. Pynchon’s novel conceptualises specific problems regarding language and its relationship with truth or reality. A novel that performs this kind of work does not necessarily align with “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” in the same way that a “nostalgia film” might [2, p. 9].
As discussed above, we need to consider the historical moment in which Jameson is working. At this stage, postmodernism and postmodernity are not as well developed as concepts, and scholars do not always clearly distinguish between the two terms. Jameson will eventually make clearer distinctions between postmodernism as a cultural form and postmodernity as a historical period [see 12, pp. 101–102]. Nevertheless, the notion of a cultural dominant in his work needs further consideration. For Jameson, the historical situation of postmodernity has a decisive influence on the cultural material of the period. He uses the film American Graffiti (1973) as an illustration of the depthlessness he sees in postmodernist cinema, given its flattening of history into a re-creation of late 1950s and early 1960s aesthetics. While we might categorise the film as postmodern in this regard, the film still uses a coming of age narrative that emphasises a series of more traditional cultural norms—particularly ones related to interpersonal relationships and education. Even in this period of postmodernity, these values remain dominant. In contrast, Jameson’s notion of a “waning of affect” is only an emergent cultural trend. Similarly, a major Hollywood film of this kind is inevitably more pervasive than metafiction by authors such as Pynchon. Further to this, the postmodernist novel often works to engage with and critique the kinds of cultural values that a film like American Graffiti presents to the viewer as known and accepted. As mentioned above, novels by DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon are not typically valorisations of postmodernity’s loss of meaning. Even if there is pleasure or enjoyment to be derived from the irony of postmodern depthlessness in post-war fiction, these novels are often also engaged with the conceptual problems of the period. For Jameson, however, this critical function of postmodern literature does not set the novel apart from the nostalgia film.
It must not have the appearance of making primary statements.… This reflects the widespread feeling that inasmuch as everything we utter is a moment in a larger chain or context, all statements that seem to be primary are in fact only links in some larger “text.” … This feeling also entails another one … namely, that we can never go far enough back to make primary statements, that there are no conceptual … beginnings, and that the doctrine of … foundations is somehow intolerable as a testimony to the inadequacies of the human mind. [2, p. 392]
Jameson has made later concessions to the discourse of theory. In 2009, he stated, “I remain committed … to the ongoing significance and vitality of that discourse called theory, which I have identified elsewhere as the construction of a language beyond that of traditional philosophy, and offering at least one possible contemporary equivalent of what used to be called the dialectic” [7, p. x]. At the time of Postmodernism, however, he is more wary of aspects of poststructuralist theory that he defines as anti-interpretive or anti-historicist. Seen from this vantage point, it becomes understandable why he is disinclined to discuss high-postmodernist novels that often seem to be in conversation with poststructuralism. Limiting these novels to their expression of poststructuralist ideas similar to that of Barthes or Foucault, however, is a repudiation of their other qualities. While Jameson has called for more nuanced and expansive readings of authors such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Émile Zola, his brief and prescriptive engagements with the postmodern novel often work to limit the interpretive possibilities.
The paranoid style of the New Right concedes the possibility that there are other orders of being which threaten and perhaps control this one, so that it needs actively to cultivate its own images in order to compete.
More to the point, this complementary anxiety on the right is vital to an understanding of paranoia in Pynchon’s California novels, which span the period of Reagan’s ascendance. Paranoia is not merely the occasion for an allegorical exercise in hermeneutic uncertainty but also an exploration of a precise cultural-historical situation: the 1960s California of The Crying of Lot 49 is the state of representational breakdown.… As such, California was also the place where the Right reacted most powerfully to this crisis, offering counter projections to recontain diversity within the logic of cold war binarism.… Pynchon’s parodic portrayals of New Right activism reveal it to be anything but traditional in its engagement with this crisis. [13, p. 65].
For Shoop, The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates how the Right mobilises representations of the 1950s in this new paranoid world view. Tellingly, Shoop references Postmodernism, particularly Jameson’s sense of the “shift from the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather different thing, the ‘fifties’” [2, p. 281]. Shoop claims that The Crying of Lot 49’s “parodic use of cultural signifiers to index the previous era … suggests that the ‘fifties’ already belongs within the quotation marks that would offset its status as representation” [13, p. 66n].
As such, Shoop’s reading aligns with Jameson’s reservations about poststructuralist interpretations of postmodern texts. He uses some of Jameson’s broader ideas regarding the period, but comes from a more contemporary perspective. In doing so, Shoop works through the tensions between historical modes that Jameson discusses in The Political Unconscious . This allows for more nuance than the “eternal present” that Jameson discusses in Postmodernism. The reading also works to position Jameson’s work in better alignment with scholars such as Daniel Grausam. In the last decade, Grausam has claimed that while “our sense that the post-1945 American canon has solidified … our categories for analyzing the period are otherwise still taking shape” [14, p. 401]. Grausam and other critics like Hungerford and Parrish have worked to combat readings that reiterate some of Jameson’s most famous notions of the period and its literature. This group of scholars has focused on the psychological, racial and spiritual aspects of the post-war novel, amongst other topics. In doing so, they have aimed at “complicating these grand narratives of an age and a literature axiomatically sceptical of grand narratives” [14, p. 399]. While emphasising the importance of these new kinds of readings, Grausam argues against Jameson’s notion of historical depthlessness. Shoop’s interpretation of The Crying of Lot 49 , however, articulates how Jameson’s writing on postmodernism—as well as historical change more broadly—might remain important for our engagement with the period’s literature.
Further to this, Shoop’s work on Pynchon highlights a limitation of Jameson’s engagement with postmodern cultural material. Considering Jameson’s resistance to specific aspects of poststructuralism, we can see how he might be less interested in the postmodern novel. Nevertheless, while Jameson points to the restrictions in a scholarly discourse dominated by poststructuralist ideas, his work does little to expand how we might think about postmodern literature beyond this kind of interpretation. Even novels with more overt political intentions are restricted in this capacity in Jameson’s work. This is particularly noticeable in his brief discussions of Doctorow. In early readings of Ragtime and The Book of Daniel , scholars were predominantly interested in describing their postmodern aspects [see 15, 16, 17]. For example, both Paul Levine and John G. Parks focused on Ragtime and its integration of historical figures into a fictional narrative, as well as how the novel foregrounds its own textuality. Jameson’s reading in Postmodernism performs many of the same operations, where he states that Doctorow is “the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American tradition: no one with left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present” [2, pp. 24–25]. Despite this attention to the political elements of Doctorow’s novels, Jameson ties Ragtime particularly to his sense that the postmodern novel is unable to represent the past, or to critique the contemporary historical mode. As discussed above, within the context of Jameson’s Marxist theoretical frameworks, this lack of a critical component diminishes the work. In this capacity, his work on postmodern literature mirrors Lukacs’ work on modernism. Jameson states that “Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning monument to the aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical referent” [2, p. 25]. This argument works in opposition to a reading like Linda Hutcheon’s, who foregrounds the political intent of Ragtime as well as its engagement with history [see 18, pp. 61–62]. Instead, Jameson emphasises that Ragtime is a “seemingly realistic novel [which] is in reality a nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of ideologemes in a kind of hologram” [2, p. 23]. For Jameson, this inauthentic realism inevitably reduces the text’s ability to produce any kind of cognitive map for the reader. While this kind of reading points to the difficulty for cultural material to perform political work in the period of postmodernity, it also fails to engage with the text’s own contemporary context. For example, Jameson briefly discusses the character of Coalhouse in Ragtime as an example of postmodern intertextuality. Coalhouse’s name and narrative closely mirror that of the German novella Michael Kohlhauss (1810), but the reader is invited to make connections, beyond other literary works. Coalhouse is a black musician who forms a militant group after having his car torched by a local fire chief. Set in the first decade of the twentieth century, the text nevertheless engages with history more contemporaneous to the novel’s production, including the Civil Rights movement or the establishment of the Black Panther Party. Similarly, the narrative of the character Tateh asks the reader to reflect on the industrial production of cultural material in the twentieth century. Jameson instead reinforces a poststructuralist reading of the text, by claiming the novel makes the same “repudiation of interpretation … fundamental [to] poststructuralist theory” [2, p. 23]. While arguing against this type of analysis, Jameson claims that Doctorow’s novels only have the capacity to reinforce poststructuralist theories of culture.
Doctorow’s novels highlight another aspect of postmodern experience similarly ignored in Jameson’s readings of postmodern texts. The subject does not necessarily enter into postmodernity’s crisis of the real with a mere “waning” of affect, but often with a sense of anxiety. Shoop’s work details how right-wing operatives are well positioned to capitalise on this anxiety, while the subject’s desire for unity is discussed at length in critical theory. This critical work often concentrates on problems of subjective experience and has drawn extensively on the work of Lacan, as well as a text Jameson references often: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Jameson references Lacan’s notion of schizophrenia to describe postmodernity, but his work often downplays problems of subjectivity in his famous articulations of the period. As seen in his discussion of films such as American Graffiti and elsewhere, Jameson sees nostalgia as working against the possibility of a cognitive map. Yet, he does not engage with the reasons why nostalgia becomes so prevalent in postmodern cultural material, or the psychological or political desires behind this change. Thinking through this notion of nostalgia, however, might allow us to frame the notion of history that Doctorow’s novel present us with in a more complex fashion. In doing so, we might arrive at the more developed sense of historical mapping that Jameson sees in realism and high modernism. Instead, this opportunity is minimised in his reading of Doctorow’s novels. By concentrating predominantly on Ragtime , Jameson also elides a detailed discussion of postmodern subjectivity. Ragtime’s characters are often presented as archetypal. The main family members being named “Father”, “Mother” and so on, while their interiority is presented to the reader with a sense of distance. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel , on the other hand, is a postmodern text very much preoccupied with notions of subjectivity and identity. Even as it plays with notions of intertextuality or representations of the past and history—and is thoroughly postmodern in these terms—it remains focused on how subjectivity, trauma and late capitalism intersect.
“Treason against the U.S. shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort.… The decision to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism.… No American has ever been executed for treason against his country,” says Nathaniel Weyl, TREASON: THE STORY OF DISLOYALTY AND BETRAYAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY, published in the year 1950. I say IF THIS BE TREASON MAKE THE MOST OF IT!
If this bee is tristante make the mort of it
If this be the reason make a mulch of it.
If this brie is in season drink some milk with it. [19, p. 168]
That this moment occurs in a discussion of treason and the legal processes that impacted on his parent’s execution emphasises the relationship between Daniel’s trauma and his sense that language and culture are faulty constructs. As the novel comes to a conclusion, Daniel begins to make decisions and acknowledge his emotions. This stands in contrast to the beginning of the narrative, where Daniel analyses his family history and remains removed from the action. In the last section of the text, Daniel attends his sister’s funeral and pays several men to read the Kaddish. The men talk over each other as they pray at the same time, creating a babble of noise. In response, Daniel claims, “I think I am going to be able to cry” [19, p. 302]. Language again becomes nonsensical, but in this moment is also cathartic for Daniel. In Jameson’s most famous work on postmodernity, he often seems to reduce the extent to which emotional experience remains important to or even possible for the postmodern subject. The Book of Daniel , on the other hand, demonstrates how our investment in traditional values is persistent throughout this period. Its central character has a familiar approach to postmodernity’s crisis of meaning, one that foregrounds detachment and irony. Yet, Daniel’s traumatic relationship to the cultural dominant demonstrates the extent to which these traditional values continue to impact on our interiority and subconscious in a significant fashion. Postmodern novels such as DeLillo’s White Noise or Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997) also investigate these competing tendencies in the postmodern subject. In this regard, postmodern literature is able to delineate certain aspects of postmodern experience unavailable to Jameson’s most commonly referenced examples drawn from film, architecture or science fiction.
As such, there remains an opportunity for these readings of postmodern subjectivity—or the political and cultural moments this kind of novel focuses on—to interact with the historicised understanding of postmodernism that Jameson articulates. Postmodern literary studies might, for example, relate the work of Grausam on postmodern fiction and fear of nuclear war with the larger notions of cultural and economic development found in Jameson. Similarly, Jameson’s narrative of historical development might add to Robert L. McLaughlin’s discussion of the return of “fiction that is placed in the social world” in what he calls “post-postmodern” literature [20, p. 59]. Jameson has often argued against criticism that reiterates Shoop’s sense of the “postmodern procedural”. Nevertheless, his limiting of the post-war novel has had the effect of denying interpretations of Pynchon and Doctorow as discussed above. In doing so, Hungerford and others have often found it necessary to write against a Jamesonian view of postmodernity. This restriction of the conceptual work that the postmodern novel can do, however, seems to be strongly linked to Jameson’s own personal preferences—as well as the somewhat negative perspective from which he writes during the 1980s and 1990s. With this in mind, a broader set of potential readings emerges, whereby analysis of post-war fiction can remain invested in Jameson’s theoretical and historical frameworks while integrating a wider set of interests, as well as a different historical vantage point. While a text like Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief makes efforts to focus on elements of post-war fiction less related to a Marxist sense of class and economics, Shoop’s work shows how the postmodern novel, previously viewed as ahistorical, expresses a variety of cultural and political changes. Throughout his career, Jameson has claimed that interpretation of texts must be thoroughly historicised. While he has often provided these kinds of readings of realist novels in particular, he has not done so for postmodern literature. Ironically, for scholars of the postmodern novel to perform a similar kind of operation, they must move past Jameson’s influential articulations of the period.
Jameson and Genre Fiction: The Limits of Utopia
More recently, Jameson has sought to reframe these early descriptions of postmodernity, both obliquely in The Antinomies of Realism and more explicitly in essays such as “The Aesthetics of Singularity” (2015). Nevertheless, this work has not extended to reconsider the canonical postmodern novels of Pynchon and others. Throughout his career, however, Jameson has regularly offered a differing vantage point from which to consider the post-war period. In this manner, his discussions of generic fiction have commonly served as a counterpoint to his more pessimistic portrayals of postmodern cultural material. Jameson concentrates on two specific types of genre novel in earnest: that of detective fiction and, more prominently, of science fiction. In both cases, these generic forms offer elements of the cognitive mapping operation. For Jameson, cognitive mapping is a process by which “we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as social confusion” [2, p. 54]. For example, he sees the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler as a later iteration of the social mapping found in realism, a procedure that is no longer available to high-postmodern literature. Science fiction, on the other hand, provides a historical perspective not available to other postmodern texts. In contrast to his work on Doctorow and the nostalgia film, Jameson claims that representations of the future allow for a more dialectical view of the present moment. He frames the science fiction novels of certain mid-twentieth-century writers—Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem in particular—as providing this perspective. Jameson has produced a lengthier consideration of the genre in one major text: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). The newer material found in the work uses examples from a long history of utopian and science fiction novels in order to discuss the limits of utopian imagination and desire. We should note that Jameson remains cautious in his privileging of these genres, and he often details the current difficulties for mapping operations or utopian thought. Once again, however, these operations rely on the construction of generic boundaries which he attributes Marxist valences. The following section will explore Jameson’s work on detective and science fiction in order to delineate the privileged relationships they occupy within his theory, and to better define his relationship to our own present.
Since the War, the organic differences from region to region have been increasingly obliterated by standardization; and the organic social unity of each region has been increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the new closed lives of the individual family units, by the breakdown of cities and the dehumanization of transportation and of the media which lead from one monad to another.… If there is a crisis in American literature at present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful social material, in which only trick shots can produce the illusion of life. [6, p. 69]
In comparison, Jameson argues, “a case can be made for Chandler as a painter of American life; not as a builder of those large-scale models of the American experience which great literature offers, but rather in fragmentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature” [6, p 67]. For Jameson, the detective is a figure who traverses a range of social and geographical terrain, offering a larger view of contemporary society than most individual subjective experiences: “Since there is no longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social structure can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole.… The detective … fills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole” [6, p. 69]. In this manner, the essay represents an early consideration of cognitive mapping, even as larger senses of global capitalist frameworks do not enter the discussion. For Jameson, a sense of social disintegration in Western postmodernity already presents several challenges for cognition and aesthetic representation.
Jameson’s work on science fiction, meanwhile, began in earnest in the mid-1970s, and the genre has become an important part of his theoretical project. Critics consider Jameson’s early articles on science fiction—most of which appeared in the journal Science Fiction Studies—as paradigmatic work in the field. The articles include “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative” (1975), “After Armageddon: Character Systems in P. K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney” (1975) and “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future” (1982). As John Duda notes, literary criticism of science fiction was “a field that had barely been established when … ‘Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss’ Starship’ … was first published in the second issue of the seminal journal Science Fiction Studies” [21, p. 1245]. In this initial material, Jameson concentrates on particular groups of science fiction authors. He is primarily interested in “Golden Age” and “New Wave” writers working in the 1950s up until the 1970s. Throughout his career, Jameson discusses major figures from these eras, such as Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, Dick, Le Guin, A. E. Van Vogt and many others. His work only occasionally considers earlier examples of the genre. As mentioned in the chapter on realism, he only offhandedly positions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as science fiction’s inaugural text, and he rarely discusses figures such as Jules Verne. Similarly, Jameson remains less interested in “hard science fiction” and concentrates on more conceptual, psychological and experimental novels. For example, in a discussion of science fiction’s Golden Age, he claims: “Van Vogt’s work clearly prepares the way for that of the greatest of all Science Fiction writers, Philip K. Dick, whose … stories are inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by Van Vogt, and very different in spirit from the more hard-science aesthetic ideologies of his contemporaries” [4, p. 315]. Jameson’s appraisal of Dick, and his ongoing interest in the later fiction of Le Guin, Lem and William Gibson, reinforces this interest in science fiction’s conceptual abilities, rather than its engagement with technological development.
In much of this early material, Jameson concentrates on notions of the present. He compares his chosen texts with high-literary examples and reads the science fiction visions of the future as allegorical of contemporary problems. For example, in “World Reduction in Le Guin”, he reads J. G. Ballard’s novels as translating “both physical and moral dissolution into the great ideological myth of entropy, in which the historic collapse of the British Empire is projected outwards into some immense cosmic declaration of the universe itself as well as of its molecular building blocks” [4, p. 269]. From his earliest essays on science fiction, however, Jameson also elevates the possibility for the genre to be productive in a Marxist sense. In “Generic Discontinuity in Brian Aldiss’ Starship”, he discusses “one of the supreme functions of SF as a genre, namely the ‘estrangement’, in the Brechtian sense, of our culture and institutions—a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness, their profound dependency on the accidents of man’s historical adventure” [4, p. 255]. The political component that science fiction acquires in these passages and others—the potential to conceptualise and express the historical situation of late capitalism—is substantially at odds with the limited set of possibilities that Jameson attributes to cultural material in his later discussions of postmodernity.
This initial spate of work on science fiction would conclude somewhat with the publication of “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” (1982). The essay is an early portrayal of the difficulties that cultural material faces when representing the past. Jameson extrapolates from Lukács’ work in The Historical Novel (1937), in order to discuss contemporary texts: “What is original about Lukács’s book is not merely [a] sense of the historical meaning of the emergence of this new genre, but also … the profound historicity of the genre itself, its increasing incapacity to register its content, the way in which, with Flaubert’s Salammbô … it becomes emptied of its vitality and survives as a dead form” [4, p. 285]. Jameson then interprets a primary example of the nostalgia film, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), in a similar manner. For Jameson, “Flaubert’s Carthage and Kubrick’s eighteenth century, but also the industrial turn of the century or the nostalgic 1930s or 1950s of the American experience, find themselves emptied of their necessity, and reduced to pretexts for so many glossy images” [4, p. 285]. Jameson aligns the emergence of Jules Verne with “the moment in which the historical novel as a genre ceases to be functional”, and discusses the social function of imagined futures [4, p. 285]. Through this work, Jameson argues, “the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” [4, p. 288]. In this manner, Jameson considers how representations of the future invoke a wider sense of the historical, rather than predominantly operating as a commentary on capitalism’s present-day structures.
There is … in my mind some question as to whether the SF novelist can plan architectonic effects … in the way a conventional novelist—for example, the Flaubert of Salammbô —can, building carefully to an experience of proportion and time carefully blocked out by number of pages, by overexposure to sensory detail, and above all relying on a certain set of univocal reading directions which seem to me inconsistent and even incompatible with the play of generic discontinuities in SF. [4, p. 301]
When Jameson does consider the postmodern in this work, he diminishes the importance of postmodern development to certain kinds of space, particularly the room. In “The Space of Science Fiction”, he claims: “In all the extraordinary wealth of architectural and formal innovation in what is sometimes called postmodernism today, there is one basic form which does not seem to have changed … no one has been able to invent a new … form for what we will call the room. It is as though the room … had persisted with very little modification from prehistoric times” [320–321]. Throughout this period, Jameson works to limit science fiction’s engagement with the postmodern. Despite reducing the genre’s ability to represent productive notions of utopia, he does not depict post-war science fiction in the same restrictive terms as other postmodern cultural material.
Within this period, Jameson also published “The Synoptic Chandler” (1993). The essay again focuses on Chandler’s most famous detective novels. In a similar manner to his contemporaneous work on science fiction, Jameson limits the mapping capabilities of the detective in this piece. He returns to notions of the room, in a discussion of the importance of the office to Chandler’s novels, claiming: “I am tempted to say that in Chandler the office is—if not a well-nigh ontological category—then at least one that subsumes a much wider variety of social activity than it is normally understood to do” [23, p. 39]. Through a discussion of varying spaces in Chandler, Jameson claims that notions of the office “problematize the commonsensical or ‘natural’ conception of dwelling as such in Chandler; one of its advantages is the way it allows us … to transform our first sub-form—the ‘dwellings’ of the rich … into spaces of retreat and withdrawal that are somehow more analogous to offices than to houses or even quarters or apartments” [23, p. 41]. The discussion then moves onto the nature of Chandler’s strategies of containment. For Jameson, “there can be no question that this particular ‘map’ of the social totality is a complete and closed semiotic system: unified by the category of the ‘office’, its various positions and inversions are able in a satisfactory … manner to span the breadth of the social system from wealth to poverty and … from public to private” [23, pp. 44–45]. Curiously, in a fashion that rarely occurs across Jameson’s work, this discussion seldom seeks to discuss how historical contexts influence these matters of form. In the essay’s introduction, Jameson claims that the limits and repetitions of Chandler’s fiction are not a result of his lack of imagination, “rather that it was his society that lacked imagination and that such undoubted limits are those of the narrativity of Chandler’s socio-historical raw material” [23, p. 34]. The portrayal of Chandler’s novels that follows only concentrates on the limits of their mapping operations, however, and Jameson restricts their overall capabilities. He depicts the formal strategies of the text as a “cognitive map of Los Angeles that Marlow can be seen to canvas, pushing the doorbells of so many social types, from the great mansions to the junk filled rooms on Bunker Hill or West 54th Place” [23, p. 53]. In contrast with “On Raymond Chandler ”, the essay does not argue for the political importance of this operation.
With the publication of Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Jameson returned to working on genre fiction in earnest, and his discussions once again align with his earlier material. We can read his interest in science fiction, along with the way in which he allows it to function conceptually, within the narrative of fluctuating optimism that Dunst denotes when he frames “Jameson’s late work as the cautious opening of the present to the past and the future” [22, p. 117]. In this regard, the lack of material on science fiction during the 1980s and 1990s fits in with his pessimism surrounding notions of political engagement at the time. In Archaeologies of the Future , however, two decades after Jameson’s first work on the postmodern, science fiction is once again adept at theoretical engagement and political imagination. In the text’s second section, he republishes many of his early science fiction essays. The opening section, however, is comprised of new material that builds on his earlier questions of utopian imagination in relation to the science fiction form. In an early chapter, he discusses Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), noting the text’s several strategies of containment: “In Utopia … the mark of … absolute totalization is the geopolitical secession of the Utopian space itself from the world of empirical or historical reality: the great trench which King Utopus causes to be dug in order to ‘delink’ from the world” [4, p. 39]. Jameson continues this work across the new material in Archaeologies of the Future , where he denotes the strategies through which utopian fiction must imagine a radical break in order to represent an alternative future. He outlines the difficulty for the late capitalist subject to conceive of a society outside of the current situation, but also the manner in which the representation of a radical break enables a new awareness of history and the potential for dialectical thought. For Jameson, “the Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would look like after the break” [4, p. 232].
I am very anxious that the texts I am going to be dealing with not be simply assimilated to the paradigms of high culture.… They cannot be read as Literature: not merely because they include much that is trash … but above all, because their strongest effects are distinct from those of high literature, are specific to the genre, and finally are enabled only by precisely those sub-literary conventions of the genre which are unassimilable to high culture. [4, p. 316]
The antagonistic religious ideologies of the Middle Ages are … combined into a contemporary anti-Enlightenment spiritualism which speaks across the spectrum to those dissatisfied with modernity.… It is also worth mentioning the ahistorical nature of these ethical preoccupations, inasmuch as it would seem to be the absence of any sense of history that most sharply differentiates fantasy from Science Fiction. [4, p. 61]
Phillip E. Wegner has claimed that “The discussion of fantasy offered in chapter 5 … is meant as much to highlight the shared aspects between the two practices as to mark their formal differences.… Indeed, fantasy is now to be understood as the practice that renders most evident the deepest drive of all science fiction, that “of forming and satisfying the Utopian wish” [24, p. 189]. Indeed, Jameson does attribute a utopian impulse to varying aspects of contemporary postmodern production (Valences of the Dialectic’s chapter on Wal-Mart is a particularly striking example). Nevertheless, it remains that he affords science fiction a number of conceptual abilities, ones not found in his discussions of other post-war cultural forms.
unsolved generic problems inherent in distinguishing fantasy from SF, and in particular in determining why any number of fantastic SF technologies, such as teleportation or time travel … should be regarded any differently from magicians and dragons. Darko Suvin’s influential conception of SF as “cognitive estrangement,” which emphasizes the commitment of the text to scientific reason, would seem to continue a long tradition of critical emphasis on verisimilitude from Aristotle on. [4, p. 63]
While Jameson neglects to name particular examples of “non-serious” science fiction, we might assume these texts contain a similar lack of the social to that of fantasy, and that their generic traits are easily interchangeable. For example, he claims that novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune provide a developed sense of economics, and “reinforce components of an essentially historical situation, rather than serving as vehicles for the fantasies of power” [4, p. 59]. In contrast, Jameson claims that fantasy breaks any sense of the economic or of class structure into a system of “castes”, whereby each social group has its own differentiated, autonomous culture that has little to do with the class systems in our own world. Crucially, he distinguishes Le Guin’s fantasy novels from other examples of the genre, whereby in works such as Always Coming Home , “the paradigm of the struggle between Good and Evil becomes socialized and historicized by way of feminism” [4, p. 67]. Despite claiming that Jameson’s engagement with fantasy does not “devalue” the genre, Wegner cites from this same passage within Archaeologies of the Future , including the following statement: “Magic [in Le Guin] may be read, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production) but rather as a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit” [4, p. 66].2 In the text, Jameson goes on to claim that, through her interest in feminism and the social, Le Guin “triumphantly demonstrates that fantasy can also have critical and even demystificatory power” [4, p. 67]. In this manner, fantasy acquires the heightened position of other generic fictions. It does so, however, through the privileged example of Le Guin—an author who elsewhere writes “serious” and utopian science fiction.
For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totalitarianism.… Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional sub-genre in which more purely “literary” writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale . And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like).… So-called mass cultural genres, in other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the more noble forms.
But Atwood can now be considered to be a science-fiction writer, I’m happy to say, and this is not meant to disparage. [25]
In this manner, Jameson briefly notes the tendency for contemporary literary novels to integrate science fiction elements, although he has not provided a sustained consideration of the limitations of this kind of operation. Wallace’s Infinite Jest or DeLillo’s Cosmopolis are set in future worlds, whether implicitly or explicitly. In contrast to the science fiction Jameson prefers, however, the high-literary novels depict a future situation only slightly more technologically advanced than our own. Postmodern hyperreality also appears as only marginally more dystopian in these texts. Jameson’s articles on postmodernism often perform a similar operation, whereby the depictions of the postmodern sublime, the waning of affect and the dissolution of boundaries between low and high art are exaggerated descriptions of contemporary situations. In many ways, we can align these essays with the work of DeLillo or Wallace. They derive much of their energy from illustrating the more delirious aspects of the postmodern condition, but also remain wary of these historical developments. These figures imagine the tendencies of postmodernity only exacerbating, with little possibility for change.
Lem’s ultimate message here [is] namely that in imagining ourselves to be attempting contact with the radically Other, we are in reality merely looking in a mirror and “searching for an ideal image of our own world.” This is why there is a way in which the operation is not merely self-defeating but even suicidal, for in order to strip away the anthropomorphism, we must somehow do away with ourselves. [4, p. 111]
Jameson sees other works, such as Alien, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Roadside Picnic, as offering similar considerations of varying problems of unknowability. In this manner, he presents the hypothetical scenarios and outcomes of science fiction as something like critical investigations, without reminding the reader that the novels build these narratives from certain formal conceits.
At the same time, Jameson is unable to strategise any further from this point. Despite his renewed sense of optimism, he must close his argument by admitting that this work is “a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage that has not yet arrived” [4, p. 233]. As the new material in Archaeologies of the Future reaches its conclusion, it seems as if Jameson’s work on science fiction has traced its own limitations. The notion of utopia provides an avenue for Jameson to discuss the potential for historical change in a period where it seems largely impossible. Despite his “cautious opening of the present to the past and the future” in this material, he only arrives at a series of impasses. Notwithstanding the careful work he performs to articulate the conceptual valences of science fiction—above postmodern literature in particular—and the edges of utopian desire, he is unable to bridge certain gaps. The relationship between the high-literary postmodern novel and science fiction in Jameson thus becomes an extreme demonstration of how textual preferences encroach on his theoretical frameworks. While his readings of science fiction articulate a component of late capitalist experience, and potentially allow for a broadened view of history and our contemporary situation, these discussions circle a similar set of perceptual limitations to the ones he attributes to Doctorow and others. This might not be a problem of Jameson’s theoretical strategies, however, but of historical perspective. In the years following Archaeologies of the Future , his work has begun to discuss utopia in a different manner, and while the concept remains important to his work, it no longer dominates his portrayals of the future. For example, in texts such as The Antinomies of Realism and The Ancients and the Postmoderns , Jameson has further incorporated notions of collectivity and the global into his interpretive practice. At the same time, this more recent work hints at the further dissolution of specific genres. While he has often noted the breakdown of borders between high and low literatures, his classificatory operations have commonly worked to reinstate these kinds of boundaries. In the last decade, however, this tendency has diminished. As Jameson claims in his review of The Year of the Flood , “in any case it might be argued (but not here) that at this moment of time, all fiction approaches science fiction, as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous actuality: and the end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself” [25]. It would seem that the trend has continued to emerge in recent years, and presents itself as a dominant component of his newer theoretical discussions. In this manner, Jameson’s work has begun to envision the future through a different approach.
Jameson and Contemporary Cultural Material: Textual Peripheries, Cognitive Maps and the Collective
In the final chapter of The Antinomies of Realism , entitled “The Historical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible”, Jameson begins his discussion by differentiating a number of recent, popular kinds of historical fiction. He claims, “the historical novel seems doomed to make arbitrary selections from the great menu of the past, so many differing and colorful segments or periods catering to historicist taste.… In short we have to do here, as with realism, with an impossible form or genre that … is still assiduously practiced” [5, p. 260]. Throughout the opening sections of the essay, Jameson enumerates the difficulties of representing the past and charts the historical novel’s formal modifications, considering Sir Walter Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy and Joyce’s Ulysses . In this regard, the chapter discusses many of Jameson’s recurring ideas and literary figures. His analysis of the historical novel will take a different turn, however, when he focuses on the present, and on texts that are not traditional historical novels—particularly David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). Through this process, Jameson begins to dissolve many of the generic boundaries that have marked his earlier discussions. He sees Inception as science fiction, with no qualifiers that remove it from the novel form as such: “As so often in SF (in Necromancer, for example) the plot is borrowed from another genre, in this case the heist or caper film” [5, p. 299].3 In this manner, Jameson’s earlier sense that high literature borrows from—or attempts to assimilate—generic fiction has become a standard operation of the science fiction form. At the same time, he wishes to read the film “less as a text than as a model and a kind of thought experiment” [5, p. 298]. For Jameson, Inception uses the postmodern perpetual present as a formal device and a significant element of the film’s plot. The manner in which the film depicts dream worlds as objective and material realities “advances cinema itself to the degree to which it absolutely repudiates the … older [cinematic] conventions of subjectivity. These are neither dream-sequences of the traditional kind, nor hallucinations, nor even flash-backs” [5, p. 299]. Jameson then claims, “the contemporaneity of Inception (its postmodernity rather than its postmodernism) is to be found in this aesthetic of an absolute present” [5, p. 300]. The film’s levels of dreams within dreams—each operating on an exponentially slower temporal level than the last—become a representation of this postmodern situation. The elevator that the film’s protagonist uses to move between differing moments of his past provides Jameson with a model for the contemporary historical novel—one that considers the past, present and future simultaneously, and offers strategies for considering historical collectivity. This model is replicated, for Jameson, in the formal invention of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas .
The aestheticians return again and again to the problem of the extra-artistic and referential dimensions of art, in its shabby ideological messages and its altogether insufficient and rather pitiful calls to this or that action, this or that indignation or “call to arms” … this or that coming to consciousness. But the moment of the aesthetic is not that call but rather its reminder that all those impulses exist: the revolutionary Utopian, one full as much as the immense disgust with human evil, Brecht’s “temptation of the good,” the will to escape and to be free, the delight in craftsmanship and production, the implacably satiric, unremittingly skeptical gaze. Art has no function but to reawaken all these differences at once in an ephemeral instant; and the historical novel no function save to resurrect for one more brief moment their multitudinous coexistence in History itself. [5, pp. 312–313]
In this manner, Jameson finds a text that provides the cognitive mapping operation that he describes in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , as well as the interpretation of Marx that he foregrounds in the same essay, whereby “Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think [of capitalism] positively and negatively all at once” [2, p. 47]. While Jameson’s more pessimistic depictions of postmodernity often refrained from emphasising the positive aspects of late capitalism, this reading of Cloud Atlas provides a potent example of a wider view of history. At the same time, in seeing the positive and negative aspects of historical development, he perhaps moves beyond criticisms of nostalgia and offers the potential to discuss a contemporary sense of modes of production in a more dialectical fashion.
Jameson similarly expands his sense of cognitive mapping in another example of more recent cultural material. His article “Realism and Utopia in The Wire”—published five years after Archaeologies and reprinted in The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015)—comprises elements of his theory relating to realism, film, television, detective fiction, cognitive mapping and Utopian thought. Once again, Jameson works to dissolve the literary and cinematic or televisual, when he asks, “Is The Wire a police procedural … ? No doubt, but it is also a version of the organized crime story.… There is a political drama going on here as well, but its nature as local politics reminds us that it is also very much a local series.… The broadest categories would then be that of the thriller or that of the action film” [26, p. 239]. Jameson then goes on to conflate the series with the classical epic and the Dickensian serial. Despite these generic discontinuities, The Wire provides several important cognitive mapping operations. We can relate these qualities of the text to the capacities that Jameson attributes to realist and detective novels. Nevertheless, this delineation of generic boundaries and formal capabilities seems finally to disappear in this material. Up until recently, Jameson has warily differentiated the science fiction novel from high-postmodern literature, despite their various relationships. In the years following Archaeologies of the Future , however, these boundaries become of less importance. These texts are not decisively high literature, in the manner that the novels of Pynchon or David Foster Wallace predominantly are. Cloud Atlas and The Wire incorporate basic generic components with certain middlebrow notions of “prestige”, but function predominantly as composites. In his newer essays, Jameson’s classificatory operations remain as guidelines for discussing the texts, but do not serve to restrict their abilities in the same manner.
The uniform cops simply know the neighborhoods and the corners on which the drugs are finally sold to customers by teams of juveniles.… But this is as it were simply the appearance of the reality … whose ultimate structure (source, refinement, transportation, sales network, and bulk or wholesale distribution) must remain too abstract for any single observer to experience, although it may be known and studied. [26, p. 242]
In this manner, Jameson’s reading of The Wire closely aligns with his discussions of Chandler. The presence of utopian desire within the text, however, builds on the detective novel’s political importance. The show persistently represents the beginnings and failings of a variety of utopian projects, whereby individuals attempt to restructure particular components of the society that the series depicts. For Jameson, the case of the dockworker Frank Sobotka, who attempts to reinvigorate Baltimore’s port, “adds something to The Wire that cannot be found in most other mass-cultural narratives: a plot in which utopian elements are introduced, without fantasy of wish fulfillment, into the construction of the fictive, yet utterly realistic events” [26, p. 253]. For Jameson, “the future and future history have broken open both high and mass-cultural narratives in the form of dystopian science fiction and future catastrophe. But in The Wire, exceptionally, it is the utopian future which here and there breaks through, before reality and the present again close it down” [26, p. 254]. This is one of the few moments in Jameson’s career where he reads the utopian as present in the text, outside of science fiction.
One wants to think of formulations (and indeed diagrams) for collectivities that are at least as complex and stimulating as those of Lacan for the individual unconscious. These structures have certainly been glimpsed in the various explorations of the social or collective Imaginary in recent years.… Subaltern studies … offers a variety of new ways to map a whole range of collective phenomena. But it is in the nature of the beast (the human animal) to drawback from such openings … and new theoretical fashions like Giorgio Agamben’s idea of naked life are at once read as metaphysical or existential statements or at worst enlisted to prove—being a kind of zero degree—that the collective does not exist. [27, pp. 406–407]
Jameson also claims “it is not very satisfying to discuss fields that don’t (yet) exist”; nevertheless, the term has also begun to proliferate in his later work, offering a number of ways in which we might approach future notions of the concept [27, p. 407]. In The Ancients and the Postmoderns in particular, he makes several references to differing notions of the collective. Importantly, these discussions often arise in readings of particular cultural forms: for example, the films of Robert Altman and recent literary production.
each character is a bundle of … distinct narratives, and not some unified identity.… It is a view consistent with the kind of contemporary thought that evokes “multiple subject positions” and repudiates notions of the centered self; and it makes … Altman’s representation of the city … different from those earlier works which presented the latter as a combination of coincidences that finally resolve themselves into a unified picture.…
The distinction is subtle but significant … and the new genre that instantiates it expresses a new historical experience of population … of the multitude … of the phenomenonology of globalization.… This is more than a casual experience of something unique and hitherto unencountered: it amounts to an expansion of subjectivity itself and perhaps at the limit a modification of its structure. We may indeed speak here of collectivity. [26, pp. 217–218]
Here, one of Jameson’s characteristic detours represents an ellipsis in his discussion. The collaborative nature of cinematic production offers another kind of collectivity for Jameson to consider momentarily, before he returns to a discussion of the function of the “roundabouts” of connectivity to Short Cuts’ narrative form. While he will further discuss a notion of collectivity as “American misery”, these wider notions of genre, the global and the collective remain only suggestive concepts in his more recent work.
At the same time, these developments in Jameson’s theory have begun to acquire several affinities with certain areas of postcolonial study—ones concentrating on various notions of the cosmopolitan and peripheral realisms in particular. As with the relationship between Jameson and affect theory, however, the continuing distance between these scholars—seemingly a prolongation of the fallout following the Jameson-Ahmad debate—obscures the potential for productive engagement. For example, a lineage of scholars considering the cosmopolitan has maintained a cursory relationship with Jameson’s larger contributions to critical theory over the last two decades. For theorists of the cosmopolitan working in the late 1990s, Jameson’s material on the postmodern is occasionally aligned with an idealism surrounding certain theories of globalism or “postnationalism”, which is often contrasted with the continuing and very material struggles of the developing world. In his introduction to Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Pheng Cheah claims that postnational theory is derived from “the modes of production narrative that Fredric Jameson borrowed from Ernest Mandel” [28, p. 32]. Cheah sees the postnational turn as arguing that “the deterritorialization of space in transnational … late capitalism erodes the naturalized borders of the nation, pointing to its imminent demise” [28, p. 32]. Here, Cheah aligns himself with Michael Mann’s claim that “capitalist profit making has resulted in not quite Fredric Jameson’s ‘postmodern hyperspace’” [29, p. 138]. Cheah is quick to remind the reader “even as the historic role of the nation-state as a framework for economic management is eroded in the new phase of globalization, existing forms of social and political power remain based in national realities” [28, pp. 34–35]. At a certain level, Jameson’s sense of “hyperspace” has little to do with the persistence of colonial discrepancies in wealth, power and cultural visibility in the material world outside of the West. This reading, however, excises significant elements of Jameson’s work on postmodernism: notions such as “hyperspace” describe problematic aspects of Western cultural material and of subjectivity in this material. They also constitute part of what is a largely negative depiction of multinational capitalism, particularly when compared to the postnationalists whom Cheah references. In this manner, Jameson’s more well-known phrases from his work on postmodernism—such as “hyperspace”, “the waning of affect” or “the hysterical sublime”—are commonly divorced from his Marxist readings of the global.
Work on cosmopolitanism by critics such as Tom Lutz, Berthold Schoene and Robert Spencer continues in this vein. While these scholars reference Jameson’s numerous contributions to contemporary theory as a matter of course, rarely do they consider his work at length. For example, Lutz momentarily invokes Jameson when claiming that “instead of falling for what Fredric Jameson called ‘the false problem of value’, critics are now required either to disavow evaluative literary judgments or to cop to their own place of elite privilege, their own exclusionary biases” [30, p. 2]. Lutz moves on “to talk not just about regionalist fiction but about what literature, the old-fashioned Literature with a capital ‘L’, has to offer and has been offering for the last century and a half”, leaving Jameson’s own complicated engagement with these issues unexplored [30, p. 3]. Spencer, meanwhile, considers Jameson’s discussion of cosmopolitanism as a utopian project. Here, Spencer asserts that “Jameson’s calls for ‘the renewal of Utopian thinking’ … can be heeded by a postcolonial criticism prepared not just to demystify ideology … but also to amplify the ways in which literary texts help construct new, more reflexive forms of subjectivity in addition to more comprehensive forms of human community” [31, p. 55]. Despite the suggestiveness of Spencer’s claim, his engagement with Jameson here remains brief. As we can glimpse in this short passage, however, a more complimentary relationship between Jameson and more recent practices in postcolonial studies has begun to develop, even if it is only occasionally acknowledged. This is evident in both postcolonial works on the cosmopolitan as well as on “peripheral realisms”.
For the contributors devoted to recovering Georg Lukács’s theory of critical realism, Lukács is best appreciated for having located a text’s realism in its aspiration to totality, with “totality” defined not as something out there but as the demand to consider interrelations and interactions between disparate phenomena. (Thus for Lukács naturalism fails to be a critical—that is, a true—realism precisely insofar as it seeks a photographic record of immediate reality rather than a depiction of historical forces in motion or the dynamics of society.) [32, p. 277]
For Esty and Lye, the “Peripheral Realisms” issue is very much within this return to Lukács. Susan Z. Andrade and Sharae Deckard, amongst others, contribute in this fashion to the journal. This work has also mirrored certain aspects of Jameson’s project, particularly in the reading of certain contemporary novels as mapping operations. In this manner, Esty and Lye argue for “the possible advantage of peripherality for thinking relationally across different kinds of sub-ordinated positions on different scales” [32, p. 272]. Sharae Deckard, for example, seeks to see Roberto Bolaño’s depiction of Ciudad Juárez in 2666 as a cognitive mapping project of not just the Mexican border city, but also of wider global connections. For Deckard, the novel is an “insurgent attempt to reformulate the realist world novel in order to overcome the reification of earlier modes of realism.… The novel’s form is systemically world-historical, uniting a particular semiperiphery (Ciudad Juárez) and a particular historical conjuncture (late capitalism at the millennium) with a vast geopolitical scope” [33, p. 353]. Meanwhile, even as Lukács does not feature as a primary influence in the more explicitly cosmopolitan theory of Lutz and Schoene, we can see similar types of readings in their work, which often seeks to describe a larger global context for more localised narratives. For example, Schoene’s work on cosmopolitanism asserts contemporary Britain’s “unique cultural and political position as a post-imperial and increasingly devolved nation sandwiched between neo-imperial US America and supranational ‘Old’ Europe. It is this in-between position … that defines contemporary Britain’s specific globality: as part of its imperial heritage, it is linked to over three quarters of the world” [34, pp. 6–7]. These emergent reading practices have worked to expand our sense of global interrelations, while making claims for the ability of particular literatures to describe greater human collectivity.
Maps are always and already bound up in those power/knowledge networks which are the subject of Foucault’s genealogical studies, but (as Foucault also insists) that does not mean that mapmaking is itself always and only a repressive practice. The inability to map one’s position relative to a geography and social totality, as Jameson suggests, is perhaps the emblematic form of modern or postmodern alienation. And though maps function to enforce boundaries, to monitor movements, to aid the police, to capture a given space, and so on, maps may also have liberatory uses. The map of the prison, for instance, may be of help to one who wishes to escape. [36, pp. 108–109]
There is one category [of literature] in which Americans have begun to flag, and that is Faulknerian maximalism, whose interminable voices no longer seem tolerable without their Southern framework. Now, translated into something called “magic realism,” this American specialty … has been promoted into a genuinely global genre, and we glimpse, outside the confines of an American Program Era, the outlines of some wholly different world system of letters coming into being. [26, p. 292]
While Jameson has often mentioned his interest in global literature, he has rarely discussed these kinds of texts in detail. Whether his future work will further integrate notions of cognitive mapping, global literatures and historical change remains to be seen. His later discussions of a variety of cultural materials offer a multiplicity of reading strategies that hint in this direction, however, even if certain incongruities will likely persist between postcolonial studies and Jameson’s position within the United States. At this stage, it would seem that even an antagonistic engagement between Jameson and these scholarly ambits would be highly productive, especially when compared to the prolonged distance currently in place.
- 1.
The timing of this article’s production is of some significance here. Although the essay was first published in Archaeologies of the Future , Jameson assigns its production to the year 1982. As this date is right around the period where Jameson starts to use the term “postmodern” regularly, one wonders whether his notion of “modernist high literature” might include writers such as Pynchon in this instance, given his earlier senses of modernism. Note that Jameson does not use the term “high modernist literature”, but rather “modernist high literature”.
- 2.
For Wegner’s citation of this passage, see [24, p. 196].
- 3.
Please note that the reference to Necromancer appears to be a typographical error, given that William Gibson’s Neuromancer borrows narrative elements from the heist genre.